Jens Barlend’s paper raises the issue of a growing integration process of the business promotion team and newsroom department. He expressed an implicit concern about the loss of objectivity of the newsroom once the financial benefit had been involved. His blueprint for such integration remains preliminary, on which the news portal offers direct hyperlinks for other services. Although those services create profit in various ways and have different functions, they mostly remain in their basic form as interactive web pages. Nowadays, such integration has not only become one of the most critical prerequisites of an Internet giant company but has also evolved in a more complicated way. The so-called “objectivity” of the newsroom that Jens Barlend once worried about has been replaced with entertainment and marketing value.
Tencent serves as a great example of such a phenomenon, given the condition that it owns one of the most popular mobile games in China–Honor of King(HOK). There is a common agreement that HOK is based on the success of WeChat and QQ, and those social media platforms give HOK a huge group of potential players and a perfect environment for in-game social contact. To further promote the transformation of WeChat and QQ users to HOK players, Tencent added more accessible HOK ports on WeChat and QQ, allowing users to obtain HOK in-game items by increasing their activities on WeChat and QQ. Similar to the logic of the newsroom portal and extra services that Jens mentioned, Tencent is trying to exploit the influence of WeChat and QQ not only by introducing more HOK content in the forms of articles, videos, and photos but also by rewarding those platforms’ users with HOK items to encourage their playing of the game. WeChat and QQ in this context, according to Jens, are no longer a simple portal for HOK, but also an extended playground in which the players could continue their gaming activity differently, and the user could enter the HOK through a marginalized approach: it’s very likely that some users obtain the HOK item first and then download the game. Tencent is well aware of the social property of HOK, and it effectively promoted the player group of HOK by using WeChat and QQ as a portal for not only entering the game(yes, they could be used as a direct portal to HOK) but also a convenient advertisement for HOK by making it and extended area of HOK in which users and players are rewarded with HOK item that ascends the traditional boundary of “media”.
Once HOK has grown to the most dominant mobile game in China, it is capable of being used as a portal for promoting other media platforms of Tencent. Ironically, the objectivity that Jens focused on can therefore be preserved, as this sort of promotion is usually a one-way transformation, in which the HOK does not require any promotion from other media platforms of Tencent, and the newsroom department of these platforms can therefore product contents without concerning of “inevitable beneficial influence from internal departments”. Usually, once Tencent has published a new media platform, it will encourage the players of HOK to use it by putting HOK in-game items on that platform. Therefore, by downloading and using the media platform, the player could get in-game rewards. Indeed, many players would regard this as a new form of in-game mission: download something, use it for a while, collect the reward, and delete it. However, considering the incredible popularity of HOK, such a promoted method could be effective.
I’ve just discussed two forms of promotion in integrated media aggregations. Using HOK as an example, I would like to further extend the idea of Jens in a modern context and discuss how multiple more diverse media could be combined along one shared property: an emphasis on social contact. Meanwhile, I would also want to interpret the strong potential for HOK and other mobile games to serve as a strong portal to direct plays on external platforms. The increasing capacity and capability of smartphones have enabled internet companies such as Tencent with the power to weave their product matrix more tightly. Media ecology is developing at rocket speed, and I believe the relationship between HOK and WeChat & QQ could shed light on this process.
As a further supplement, I would also like to mention the “diamond” service of Tencent. This is a series of paid subscription services that give subscribers extra value-added functions on various Tencent products–similar to nowadays’ premium. The interesting part is that all diamond services–red diamond, green diamond, purple diamond, etc–are based on QQ. That is to say, instead of having three subscriptions on three different products, the owners of three diamond services have access to three premium services on one platform that serves as a portal to those services. All diamond services subscriptions will be integrated into the QQ menu, and people could commit renewal via QQ as well. QQ coin, furthermore, can be used to pay the subscription. It is your QQ account that has all those premium subscriptions, and this fact effectively extends the influence of QQ onto those services–if you have any diamond services subscription, you could also unlock some “diamond exclusive service” on QQ, making this subscription service an integrated and systematic premium offer.
This service undoubtedly reinforces the integration of Tencent products surrounding QQ, and a small case on CrossFire(CF)--an online PVP FPS game published by Tencent–could further examine the effect of such a phenomenon. In CF, players could obtain weapons through in-game purchasing or attending out-game activities based on websites. Meanwhile, CF connected to the ports of QQ, allowing it to check the diamond services status of the player–the player needs to use a QQ account to log in to this game, making such a connection simple to make. If the player has any active diamon service subscription, CF will give this player an exclusive weapon that is available as long as the subscription is active. CF does not have a diamond service itself, but it could identify all sorts of diamond services. Thus, the players have to subscript to diamond services that could also provide extra benefits on products other than CF to obtain the rewards they want in CF. The most related diamond service of CF is Blue Diamond–it refers to the QQ Games Center premium and gives its subscribers a wide range of extra services on almost every game in the QQ Games Center. While QQ serves as the main node in this ecosystem, QQ Games Center becomes the sub-node, promoting its connected products by offering generically available diamond subscriptions.
Different from the HOK example, CF represents the promotion committed via a paid subscription service. It goes one step further and produces a profit for connected media. Still, it follows the same integrated media matrix as mentioned in HOK and WeChat, and these examples both reveal a tendency in modern media that the boundaries among media are blurred. As portals become more powerful they could also be the products, the wall between the newsroom and the business department had fallen already. A web or matrix of products is connected, and every newsroom and business department could be a node itself which serves as the portal to other products and the terminal product users reached simultaneously. The concept of media centralization is more dynamic and fluid than ever before–as every popular game or media platform could be the center.
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